by Eric Blehm
Adam gave Van Hooser a rundown of his current predicament and said, “Sir, my injuries are no big deal. I can do this. Let me try to qualify, that’s all I’m asking. If there is anything you can do to go to bat for me, I won’t let you down. I just need the chance.”
Van Hooser, a by-the-book Navy man, normally did not interfere with the service’s qualification systems. “That was my protocol,” he says. But like every other SEAL, he’d learned the rules so he would understand if there was ever a time to bend or break them.
“Let me think about it,” he said to Adam. He didn’t need to think long. That same afternoon he contacted the command at DEVGRU; a few days after that he called Adam into his office. “They’re asking around,” Van Hooser told him. “It’s under review.”
Dozens of SEALs who had trained or served with Adam, from BUD/S onward, received a phone call over the next two weeks as Adam’s enlisted record and reputation were scrutinized. The response of one SEAL summarized the overwhelming sentiment: “It doesn’t matter if he’s missing an eye or has an injured hand. This is Adam Brown you’re talking about. Bring him on. Give him a chance.”
Days before the Green Team selection process was scheduled to start, Adam was summoned to a meeting with the commanding officer of the training cadre. “You’re going to be under a microscope,” he said. “No special considerations; you are up against the same qualifications as everybody else. In fact you’re probably going to be watched more closely than anybody else. But if you pass Green Team, there will never be another question about your eye or your hand. Never.”
Brad Westin, Adam’s buddy from Sniper School, along with a few dozen other SEALs from both East Coast and West Coast teams, were sweating—and not just from the humidity. It was the first day of Green Team, and they had gathered at a classified Eastern Seaboard training compound where Brad was amazed to find Adam among those assembled. Because of Adam’s eye and severed fingers, “I figured his career as a SEAL was finished,” Brad says.
“Adam! Are you in? Really?” he asked.
“I’m in,” said Adam. “They told me I get to stay in the Navy if I can make it through Green Team.”
Brad slapped him on the back, as did Dave Cain, who had been with Adam in Afghanistan. Only half of the class, which represented the handpicked best of the best—determined, motivated, and very qualified—would remain by the course’s end. And every one of the SEALs had a massive advantage over Adam.
They began the course with a PT test that 99 percent of the world’s population would likely fail. First stop: a minimum of fifteen dead-hang pull-ups with no time limit. A candidate must come to a complete hang, elbows straight, before executing the next pull-up, in which the chin must come up and over the top of the bar. Adam completed twenty-two.
Then, with only a few minutes’ break, push-ups: all the way down to touch a SEAL’s fist under the chest and all the way up to arms straight, with a three-minute time limit for a minimum of eighty push-ups. Adam did one hundred twenty.
Followed immediately by sit-ups: with a partner holding down feet, three minutes to do a minimum of ninety. Adam made it through one hundred thirty.
Another short break, then three miles of blacktop running in 22:30 or less while wearing cammie pants and running shoes. Adam’s time was 18:24.
One last short break before the bay swim: an 880-meter (just over a half mile) sidestroke in no more than thirteen minutes. Adam finished in 11:22.
Adam’s scores were average to above average among the students, all of whom passed.
After that, the real fun began—six months of rigorous training that would take them to specialized schools and facilities across the United States. There they would either exhibit perfection in or fail out of courses in combat pistol and rifle marksmanship, close quarters battle, military free-fall parachute operations, land warfare, urban warfare, desert warfare, maritime Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure (VBSS) tactics, tactical ground mobility operations, protective security detail training, and various other, classified, classes.
“The whole point of Green Team is to create as much stress and pressure on the student as possible and see if they can deal with it,” says an instructor who worked with Adam. “We don’t build them up; we break them down.” When something doesn’t go as planned or expected, “the guys who still perform the task with no mistakes are the guys we’re looking for.” Says a senior instructor, “You either perform under pressure or you fail, and we are not in the business of failing.”
Although the specific qualifications and training tactics of the CQB phase—the crux of Green Team for most SEALs—are classified, “to give you an idea of what Adam had to master, consider where we start them off,” says another instructor. “CQB begins with two-man teams doing one-room pistol clearance. They’re taught to enter the room exactly as we say, clear their lanes as we’ve instructed, and if there’s a target they engage it or they handle it if it’s a noncombatant. In addition to that they can only be within two feet of where we tell them to be inside the room.
“In other words, if we tell them to be X number of feet down their lane, if they’re under or over that prescribed distance, they underpenetrated or overpenetrated. And that’s important because there are overlapping fields of fire and over-sweeps and all kinds of crazy patterns, sort of like football plays, that we have in a playbook that will essentially teach you to storm into any structure and kill bad guys with guns. If you ‘kill’ a hostage or a civilian, that’s a strike against you, can be grounds for failure.”
“What we’re grading on,” says a different instructor, “is the ability to do what we tell you to do exactly how we tell you to do it. The pressure is piled on—we’ve got a bunch of cadres hovering over you like vultures while you’re doing it, plus you’re being filmed. There’s one or two guys looking to see if you went down the wall far enough, there’s a guy looking at your finger—when it’s on the trigger, when it’s off—a guy’s watching your fields of fire, someone else is watching your eyes, or in Adam’s case, eye, assuring that the scenario is being processed, another guy’s got a stopwatch, and you’ve got seconds, split seconds, to engage the right targets. You have friendly personnel mixed in with hostiles, and you have people yelling at you. You have to process it all, under that pressure, and be successful.”
Most master the one-room scenario, but then the trainees progress to clearing multiple rooms, or they switch to a rifle, or they begin a raid with a rifle but a situation requires them to draw their pistol. The layout gets harder and harder, with more complicated rooms and multiple levels, and “that’s when guys start to fall apart,” continues the instructor. “And it only gets harder from there, with more variables added into the equation: complicated entry points, more good guys, more bad guys. The point is you cannot tough it out, you can’t grunt through like BUD/S. These are SEALs. We already know they’re tough; now we are finding out who’s exceptional. We’re only interested in the very best.”
Says a SEAL from Adam’s class, “They put it to you, physically and mentally, but mostly it’s mental. The days start at 0’dark thirty with PT, but they aren’t trying to torture you, and you aren’t deprived of sleep like Hell Week. Some SEALs think BUD/S is fun, but even those guys think Green Team sucks.” If a SEAL makes a mistake in the “kill house,” the training facility for CQB, for example, a punishment might be extra PT, such as climbing ladders with heavy gear or the tire pull: a tractor tire hooked up to a rope and dragged through a series of wind sprints.
That’s where Adam ended up, sent by the cadre to the tire pull after he’d swung around in a room and bashed the side of his head into a pole. “Hit your blind spot, huh?” one of his buddies asked, to which Adam replied, “No, man. Don’t tell anybody, but that was the side with my good eye.”
According to an instructor, the Green Team selection process is very specific. “Everything is on paper, and you either accomplish what is needed to qualify or you don’t. We were skeptical abou
t Adam because you have to use your peripheral vision a lot; you have to clear corners, be aware of movement to alert you to threats.” This meant that while most SEALs glanced left and right, Adam had to swing his entire head around, which ate up fractions of seconds. “We’re working against an enemy’s reaction time and making sure our guys are faster,” says the instructor, “so it was amazing—we were all blown away—because he was shooting off-hand with pistol and rifle and making accurate shots.”
Trainees are allowed mistakes, just not very many of them, and once an issue has been pointed out they must correct it—and quickly. Every time Adam was counseled, at about the same rate as other SEALs, it was something he had to overcome because of his eye; weapon manipulation with his injured hand was flawless. “Adam, you messed up because it’s on your weak side,” an instructor told him. “Other guys aren’t messing that up because they don’t have the deficiency like you do. The only way you can overcome that is to not have a weak side. You have to physically turn your head to the point where you can make up for that blind spot with your left eye. You need to have a rubber neck, on a swivel constantly, twice as much as you used to. You’ve got to get used to that.”
“Roger that,” said Adam. “I’ll figure it out. I will get it.”
Thereafter, Adam was known as Swivel or Rubberneck by the training cadre in CQB, while continuing to maintain “the best attitude,” says one of them. “It was eyes wide open, ears as big as they could be. He was full of just ‘Give me the information, give me as much information as you can and I’m going to make it happen; I really, really want to be here.’ ”
The training cadre knew, as DEVGRU SEALs themselves, that the men they passed would receive the most important and dangerous missions, and that their lives and the lives of their teammates depend on precision and perfection. Passing Adam Brown—the first time a trainee was ever let through CQB virtually blind in one eye (not to mention shooting off-handed)—was a huge decision for the cadre. “We had to set aside our own reservations, knowing Adam could only see half as much as anybody else,” says an instructor. “We looked at the standards, and unanimously we agreed: he met them.”
During the maritime segment of the course, the Green Team class was on a VBSS ship-boarding exercise when a trainee made an inexcusable blunder. He had left his weapon in his locker.
“It was dark,” says a trainee named Frank O’Connor. “The instructors were keeping track of so many details—it’s a dangerous exercise, watching for our safety—they didn’t notice this guy did not have his M4 slung over his back.” When the exercise was completed, some of the students leaked the information to the instructors. “They wanted to get the guy canned for what was a huge mistake.”
The following day when the class gathered to review the exercise, an instructor announced that he’d heard a trainee had forgotten his weapon the night before. He waited to see how the class would react, if the guilty party would fess up. Silence. Then Adam stood up.
“This is crap!” he said. “We need to take care of things like this internally. We don’t need to be running behind each other’s backs to the instructors. That could have happened to any one of us, and we’d be counting our blessings right now if the cadres didn’t notice. We are a team.”
“Now, I got my own problems,” says Frank, who, like everyone else, listened to Adam without saying a word. “In Green Team you do not want to bring attention to yourself, and especially not standing up for an idiot mistake, but Adam—who had more riding against him because of his injuries than any of us—did exactly that. He stood up for what he believed in.”
Despite Adam’s appeal, the SEAL was cut from the program, but after that, “nobody ever doubted Adam’s loyalty,” says an instructor. “He was the definition of a team player. And we liked that.”
The crux of Green Team for many SEALs is CQB, but the crux for Adam was passing the rigid requirements of the Military Free Fall (MFF) portion. Green Team trainees must flawlessly perform fifteen different tasks while free falling from as high as twenty-five thousand feet—generally a High Altitude, High Opening (HAHO) jump—over the deserts of the Southwest. They get two tries per task, all under the watchful eye of the cadre who free fall alongside, filming the trainees in order to later scrutinize their performance.
It didn’t matter that many of the SEALs had already gone through the Army’s MFF school, because they all had to complete the tasks. And Adam, who had done only the required static-line jumping where a cord pulls the chute open instantly upon exiting the aircraft, was behind the power curve and starting from square one. Adam had gritted his way through everything that stood before him his entire life, but “in free fall it doesn’t matter how tough you are,” says Dave Cain. “You have to be graceful and composed, which isn’t easy when you’re falling toward the earth at terminal velocity. If you fight it, you tumble and you fail.”
The most stable way to fall is “belly to earth,” the position to be in when the rip cord is pulled to deploy the parachute. That position creates a vortex of air that pulls the chute from the pack and straight up. If a person’s body is sideways, upside down, feetfirst—any way but flat, smooth, belly to earth—when the chute is deployed, the situation becomes very dangerous. Cords can tangle around legs, arms, or neck and prohibit the parachute from opening completely. Most free-fall fatalities result from improper chute deployment.
From early on Adam struggled with his ability to fall stable, which was necessary both for safety as well as to complete the other tasks while “flying” in formation with fellow SEALs. As the lead instructor reviewed the video of one of Adam’s earliest jumps in front of the class, there was Adam sideways in the air, firmly grasping the rip cord he’d just yanked. The chute was deploying behind and beside him.
“The video does not lie,” said the instructor. “Brown! Do you have a f—ing death wish? Everybody else! This is exactly what you do not want to do. Flatten out, fall a few more hundred feet, do whatever you need to, but do not do this. You’re better off hitting the ground than deploying here—then at least you don’t take someone else with you.”
That stern reprimand set the tone for the next three weeks as Adam tried to embrace gravity, not fight it.
He spent hours in the practice wind tunnel figuring out the aerodynamics of his body, and barely squeaked by each required task. But as he neared the final jump day, he had yet to exhibit immediate stability upon exiting the aircraft. “This is one of the hardest things to grasp in all free fall,” says an instructor. “If you’re not totally relaxed and accepting of the initial blast of wind, then it will throw you upside down or into a spin. Body position upon exit is crucial.”
Adam had completed his other tasks—altitude checks, checking for other jumpers, maintaining a heading—because he could stabilize himself within seconds, but that wasn’t fast enough. Dave Cain was also having a hard time, and he and Adam were each summoned to the lead instructor’s office the night before the final day of the course.
“Tomorrow is it,” said the instructor. “You have two more jumps. That’s all I can give you. If you can’t nail it, you’re out. You need to dig deep and figure out what’s wrong and get that done tomorrow, because we won’t have this talk tomorrow afternoon. You’re either going to pass or you’re done.”
Back in his hotel room Adam called Kelley and asked her to pray, then dialed Billy White, who, despite continuing to suffer from the injuries incurred nine months earlier, had been able to return to work in the FBI’s counterterrorism department. Besides being in the bureau, Billy had been a free-fall instructor for years. When he answered, Adam let out a big sigh.
“Hey, man, I need a pep talk,” Adam said. “I’m about to fail MFF. I’m not able to exit and fall stable. If I don’t pass, I’m going to action out—no DEVGRU. It’s over.”
Billy was reassuring. “That happens all the time,” he told Adam, “and the reason is something that’s easily fixable. This is not your final chapter. God ha
s not brought you from getting your eye shot out and your fingers cut off, passing CQB left-handed and half-blind. He’s not brought you all this way to fail you out because you can’t fall stable. Let’s talk about the stability thing: people who are strong and harder than nails, like yourself, they’re rigid, their bodies are fixed, and they’re like a propeller. They’ll spin and turn and they’ll flop. Like a leaf. If you drop a leaf off a tree, it doesn’t fall straight.”
“So what do I need to do to overcome that?” asked Adam.
“Just relax. If it’s truly a stability problem, it can be fixed by relaxing. And, dude, you’ve got to know that God’s mission is not to fail you out for this. He has greater things in store for you than that.”
In the early morning hours of the critical day, Dave stepped out onto the balcony of his second-floor hotel room. “I could not sleep at all,” he says. “And there was Adam two doors down, and I could tell he was sweating just like me. He’s talking to himself, wringing his hands, leaning hard on that railing. He was looking at the ground, then looking up at the sky, and then back down at the ground. I startled him a little when I said, ‘Can’t sleep, huh, Adam?’ And he was like, ‘Let me guess. You can’t either?’ ”
“Nope,” said Dave. “Haven’t slept all night. I’m totally stressed out.”
“Well, I’m praying to God that we don’t have to jump in the morning,” said Adam. “I need a day off to relax and get my head screwed back on.”
“Throw a prayer up for me too. I’ll take whatever I can get.”
“You got it,” said Adam, and they both turned in.
Boom! Adam woke up less than an hour later, thinking he heard the impact of artillery fire. As the rumbling repeated, he opened the heavy window blinds and found a beautiful sky. It looked like doomsday: cloud cover as far as the eye could see, with big clumps of charcoal-gray thunderheads. Lightning flashed, and somebody knocked at his hotel room door.